


the fall

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Blood and Gore, Bloodplay, Dark!Charles, Descent into Madness, Fallen Angels, Fighting Demons, Gen, Inspired By Tumblr, Mind Control, Mind Manipulation, Murder, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 14:11:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik is injured, and there's no one else but him who can get to the bottom of this particular mystery: a building that was razed after it became the scene of a grisly crime has suddenly reappeared, seemingly overnight. He has to go, he has to find out what's going on - and he finds out far far more than what he wanted to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cesare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cesare/gifts).



> Tumblr inspirations:
> 
> > The basic idea for this comes from [this gifset](http://codenamecesare.tumblr.com/post/58274940292/our-girl-friday-if-sweet-sweet-god-loves-you) of a scene from the movie _Constantine_ : the angel Gabriel, played by Tilda Swinton, takes down Constantine, played by Keanu Reeves.
> 
> > The black gloves mentioned here look like [these](http://codenamecesare.tumblr.com/post/58231725437/anatsuno-stammsternenstaub-lilprince).

The phone rang. His muscles were cramped. He’d slept four hours out of the last thirty-six. His eyes nearly refused to open. Leaden weights on every inch of his skin, hanging off his nerves and his muscles.

Erik Lehnsherr groped for the receiver and mumbled into it. He had no idea what was saying.

“It’s me,” Emma Frost told him. There was nothing cold about her voice. She sounded upset. There was a hardness, something clipped, about her tone. “We’ve found something.”

That should have been enough to rouse him. He attempted it, as best as he can, but there was a crack of sharp pain along his side and he just barely stifled the groan that threatened to come out of his mouth. “Talk to me,” he said, and knew that he sounded like he was on his last legs.

Disbelief in her words. “Can you even get to your feet right now?”

“No matter. No time,” he said. “It has to be me. It has to be done. _Tell me._ ”

“Okay.” She rattled off an address.

It was a familiar address. Everyone in the city knew of that place. An old building, old-fashioned. Gargoyles and stained glass and shattered furniture. Faint stains on the walls, roughly man-height.

That address had been all over the news five years ago. It had been the focal point of one hell of a story. A man had gone mad. Speaking in tongues. Unintelligible ravings. Claims of an angelic inspiration. There were weapons around him, too earthly by far, and too many to count. An old sword, still usable, in the sense that it still had an edge. Death by beheading, nothing clean about it. Bodies hacked to death, pre- and post-mortem.

Erik had been there for most of the investigation.

He’d been broken by it: by the endless procession of gruesome fact. By the shadows that clung like grim grotesque claws to the faces of the dead, and to the face of the culprit, and eventually to the faces of the men and women trying to make sense of the story.

It had not been possible to do so. Not after the man had committed suicide. He’d torn out his veins with his own teeth, singing rapturously as he bled out. A slow, red death.

He had broken out of prison to return to the place where he’d gone on his rampage, and the address had been condemned after.

Now the building that had stood there was gone. For that, too, Erik had been present: the city had sent in its cranes and bulldozers and excavators to demolish the place. 

Now he told Emma, “I was there. That place is gone.”

“I know that.” She only sounded weary. “Believe me, Erik, I know. I sent Moira to check and triple-check. She very nearly decked me for it, and just between you and me, I would have preferred to be decked over hearing that news. I would rather forget what I heard from her. But that’s not possible now. The building is there, Erik. And that’s where you have to go.” 

There was a pause on the line.

Erik started to put the receiver down.

“Erik,” Emma said, clearly.

“Emma,” he said. There was something about her voice that made him feel alone, now: alone, and with a gaping hole torn out of his middle.

“Be careful,” she said.

He didn’t reply. He was always careful.

But there was blood on the sheets.

He limped across the room to the first-aid kit, and began to unwind his bandages.

A shallow slash of a wound skating up his left flank. The damage was minimal. The pain was another story completely: a relentless throb tied to the runaway beat of his heart. There was no rest in that pain: it was constant and piercing. 

He must have torn the scabs open as he tossed and turned in the sheets. A fresh coating of povidone-iodine, darker than the blood flowing from the rent in his skin. New bandages. He had to tighten the knot with his fingers, until his knuckles cracked in protest - and then he applied further pressure with an elastic bandage that went around his torso. Now he could only take short, rapid breaths.

There was no one to soothe the pain of putting his battered and sweat-soaked clothes on. His hands refused to work the knot in his tie - he went without. The suit jacket was too narrow in the shoulders and too wide at the wrists. There was a weight in the front pocket of the trousers: an ancient mobile phone, the numbers on the keypad long since faded away.

Wearily, Erik shrugged on the belts and holsters that allowed him to carry his weapons around with him. A knife strapped into the small of his back; a pair of battered handguns, modified to carry extended magazines. A short stiletto in the left sleeve of his jacket. He filled his pockets with ammunition. 

Last, his riot shotgun. Scratches all over the stock, some wear and tear on the rest of the barrel. 

It was entirely possible that these weapons would do him no good.

He still had to carry them with him. He had to try. He had to fight.

By the time Erik steps out onto the sidewalk the clouds have completely obscured the waning moon, well on its way to a sliver of a crescent. No stars were visible. The very air itself seemed thick, viscous in the airways. 

A pale, attenuated mist heralded his movements as he made his way to the address that Emma had given him.

No one was out on the streets: no foot traffic, no cars. A faint echo of a squawk in the distance: a vehicular accident, maybe. Erik paid no heed to the sound. 

He listened carefully to his own footsteps on the pavement: quiet thuds. There were no echoes.

He turned the last corner, and there it was.

A pile of rubble, and over that pile loomed a shadow exactly in the shape of the old building. Was it the mist? Was it the listless dark of the night? Was it his own memories? Either way, he could almost see the details again. The gargoyles that leered at him; the contorted figures in the stained glass windows. The mocking expression on the lion’s head on the front door, with the ring hanging from its teeth - cobwebs and dust and grime on the faded, weathered mane.

He hesitated on the sidewalk. Would the place vanish once he was on the front step? Or when he knocked?

A second, more terrifying possibility: Would the building vanish once he was inside?

He took out his mobile phone and dialed Emma’s number without taking his eyes off the shadowed facade; the call went to voicemail.

“Emma,” he whispered, and hoped that the message was being recorded at all. “If you don’t hear from me again tonight, blow this fucking place up. Imaginary or not, just wreck it. Salt the earth. Did they do that the last time? We should have remembered. _Someone_ should have remembered. Erik.”

He dropped the phone back into his pocket before reaching for the knocker.

The door opened on its own. The creak of the motion turned into a soft screech, like distant laughter, and then fell abruptly into silence.

Erik winced, put his hand to the wound in his side, and stepped in.

He was expecting the door to slam itself closed as soon as he was inside.

He wasn’t expecting the sweet song: sweet and dark and dragging. The melody was almost familiar, like something he’d heard when he was a child. Something was wrong with the beat of it, the tempo: as though the notes were being knocked askew. A minor key. A whisper that was not at all like words.

He chambered a round into the shotgun. The sound of the action working as it should was comforting, but only for a moment.

A stench of dust and blood and sour sweat. He stepped into thick layers of dust and left no footprints behind.

He could hear something very nearly like conversations in every corner, following him. Unseen observers. 

He wanted very much to turn tail and _run_.

He walked back toward the central room, the room where the murders had taken place, and he passed a hundred open doors, each yawning emptily at him, each a place where he could hear bones rattling.

Movement in the shadows: something fleeting, fluttering. Mixed in with the relentless whispers, with the off-kilter melody, a quiet thump, repeating over and over again. 

It wasn’t the beat of Erik’s own heart.

It was the movement of something else.

There was someone standing in the central chamber. Someone or something: shaped like a man, like a beautiful man, with glossy dark hair shot through with copper and gold. Eyes the color of the sky before a storm, dark blue full of shadows. Skin so pale it was almost translucent.

White clothes. A thin shirt that clung to muscle, that even exposed the skin in some place, because it was ripped up and torn and shredded. Plain white trousers with hems in an almost familiar, almost disturbing shade of deep red-brown.

As the beautiful man in the central chamber held out his black-gloved hands to Erik, his wings, too, moved: sooty gray everywhere, barred in darker gray.

“Hello,” the beautiful man said. “It’s nice to see you here.”

Erik leveled his shotgun at the beautiful man. “Whatever it is you’re doing here, you have to stop. This building is not supposed to be standing.” He knew that his voice was shaking as he spoke, and he hated himself for it. “This is a condemned place.”

“I see,” the beautiful man said, putting on a considering expression. There were intricate melodies in the seemingly affable words. “Why is it condemned? Why must the building be pulled down? It was not the building that committed the crime. The fault is with a man, and that man is dead.”

“The man claimed that he was driven mad by this place.”

“And you would believe the word of a madman over the word of one such as myself?”

Erik shook his head. “I don’t know what you are and frankly, I don’t care.”

That made the beautiful man smile.

Erik took a step backward.

The beautiful man’s teeth were ivory-white and pointed.

“You should care,” was the response. “You should know who I am.”

One moment, Erik was on his feet, finger on the trigger of his shotgun.

And then he hit the ground, hard: he felt the wound in his side begin to bleed again, and he couldn’t catch his breath for several moments.

He was on his back, now, and the beautiful man was standing over him - _on_ him. One foot with neatly trimmed nails and a strange pattern of freckles on the ankle was on his chest, unbelievably heavy. Erik couldn’t shake him off, couldn’t move the foot aside.

“Stay down,” the beautiful man murmured, smiling. His red, red mouth curved lovingly around the words, forming a perfect round O at the end. “It’ll be easier like this, I think.”

Erik fought to get up, and couldn’t. He couldn’t reach his knife or his pistol.

He shook his left arm wildly, trying to slide his stiletto out - but just as the slender tip of the blade emerged from his sleeve the beautiful man put his other foot down on Erik’s wrist.

Erik thrashed even harder despite the blade now being pressed into his skin, and the beautiful man didn’t move an inch, though he was standing completely on Erik’s body.

A soft laugh bubbled from that elegant smile. “Shall I tell you who holds you captive? People will ask, you see. They will want to know whose words you speak so that they may come here and learn. They will need to find me, and they will find me if they speak my name. You must know your lord and master, Erik Lehnsherr. Listen to me.”

Erik closed his eyes, tried to close his mind - but the sound of the wings was all around him, matching the rapid beat of his fearful heart. 

“Erik, Erik,” the beautiful man whispered, so close. A sweet fragrance in the words, like dying flowers and shattered iron and red, red dust. “ _Heed me. Obey me._ ”

“No,” Erik hissed. “No. _I won’t._ ”

A sigh, musical. “Ah, well. Desperate times.”

Erik steeled himself for - for what, really, he had no idea. Was he going to die? Were these his last moments of lucidity? Would he no longer be himself when he opened his eyes?

Heat, searing his throat. A tight grip around his collar.

Erik couldn’t help but gasp: linked to the beautiful man this way, he could feel the unnatural strength in that compact frame as he was bodily lifted from the dust and from the grime. Lifted until his toes were no longer touching the floor.

He shivered, and struggled - weakly, now - and still he was held fast.

The beautiful man’s breath, cloying. So close. 

Erik wanted to flinch away, and couldn’t.

“Erik Lehnsherr. Hear me. My name - ” 

The whispering voice trailed off, as did the beat of the wings, as did all of the whispers: silence like a thunderclap, sudden and physical and shocking, and Erik made the mistake of being surprised, of opening his eyes.

Now he was looking into the perfect blue of the beautiful man’s eyes.

And now the beautiful man was whispering to him from inside his own head. Sweet smile full of sharp edges. 

_My name, Erik, is Chasmodei._

And with the name Erik knew who the beautiful man was, _what_ the beautiful man was, and he was bleeding and breathless and broken, beneath the beautiful man’s hands, just like the last man to have died here - 

Blood had never smelled so sweet before, he thought, as the beautiful man touched his left side, then touched his own mouth with fingertips wet with Erik’s blood. Red and pale skin and black leather.

“You are mine, Erik. First and mine.”


End file.
